Gnome Activities Freeze/Crash

[tbs]

Hey guys,

first time posting here, after reading for quite a while since now I have encountered a problem I am not able to solve for myself.

I am running a machine with CentOS 7.6.1810 and Gnome 3.28.2 which was running fine until an yum update at the end of June (with a quite large number of packages), which made Gnome unstable and unusable for me. What happens is that the desktop becomes unresponsive while using Gnome's Activities screen. The most reliable way to reproduce the behavior is dragging an icon in Activities which will freeze it 100% of the time. Already running applications will continue to run and the cursor is still reacting but other than that there is no interaction possible. After logging in remotely an executing "killall -3 gnome-shell", the desktop gets back to normal and will react normally.

Rolling back the update using yum history did fix the issue for the time being.

I am wondering where I could find log files or anything else that could be a good starting point for investigating the issue. Looking at /var/log/messages while reproducing the issue won't give me anything useful.

Thanks a lot, any help appreciated!

[aks]

As you're using version 7, the logs are now going to journald (use journalctl to read) and not in ~/.xsession-errors as was the case with version 6.

[schadfield]

I have seen the same issue. I also noticed it can be triggered by mouse movements in the Activities view. I have frequently had to switch to an unused terminal and replace the gnome-shell process to get working again.

[tbs]

As you're using version 7, the logs are now going to journald (use journalctl to read) and not in ~/.xsession-errors as was the case with version 6.

Thanks. Unfortunately, following the journald log using journalctl -f while reproducing the issue doesn't give me any output. I tried adding "_UID=1000" to get specifically this user's session logs which didn't help.

I have seen the same issue. I also noticed it can be triggered by mouse movements in the Activities view. I have frequently had to switch to an unused terminal and replace the gnome-shell process to get working again.

Good to know that I am not the only one experiencing this issue. Were you able to solve it or would it just randomly go away?

[TrevorH]

There's another thread reporting a similar problem with a particular package: try downgrading only gjs and see if that helps.

[tbs]

Thanks a lot, Trevor, that indeed seems to have caused the issue. I redid the update of all packages only excluding gjs. I can use the Activies screen like before without crashing it.

[TrevorH]

I would suggest searching on bugzilla.redhat.com for similar bugs and reporting the problem there if you don't find anything current